


no matter what we get out of this

by silver_and_exact



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Catharsis, Crying, Fix-It, M/M, Sorry Not Sorry, hamlindigo blue, i made Chuck a homophobe, only Jimmy, there is no Saul Goodman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-22 05:50:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3717535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_and_exact/pseuds/silver_and_exact
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of going to Chuck's house, Jimmy breaks into HHM in the middle of the night.  He's not quite sure why.  Set post-1x09 ('Pimento').  Alternating silliness and angst abounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no matter what we get out of this

Not for the first time this evening, Jimmy McGill sincerely wishes he was drunk. 

Truthfully, he’s a little scared that he’s not—drinking would be leaps and bounds more natural than whatever it is he’s doing right now, which is chain-smoking and pacing outside of the back entrance to HHM in the middle of the night and generally feeling like the Son of Sam in a world overrun by talking dogs. 

He keeps thinking about that basement dungeon-office Howard was going to move Kim into when she lost the Kettleman case and how pathetic it is that he really wants that office—the worst office in the whole fucking place and it’s probably twice the size of his modified utility closet in the back of the nail salon.  When Jimmy snuffs his cigarette he’s already got another one lit.  He turns his cell phone off when Kim calls for the seventh time. 

He’s not sure what he’s planning on doing, but he’s got a terrible feeling that it’s nothing much at all.  He feels like he’s standing vigil for something dead.  Like he’s in mourning.  Overall, he feels melodramatic.  But he’s not drunk, not even crying.  Somehow, his failure to act conventionally pathetic seems even more pathetic.  Obviously this is because he’s so naïve that when everything went to hell he couldn’t even muster an appropriate sense of outrage.

For some reason that's presently unknown to him, he manages to get the door open, courtesy the ever-handy skillset of Slippin’ Jimmy.  He rifles through his pockets, flattens out a crumpled dollar, buys himself a cup of coffee from the vending machine and it tastes lightyears better than the coffee at the courthouse.  (Howard probably ordered some fucking fifty-dollars-a-pound coffee in a solid gold Starbucks bag to stock the machine with.)  He’s too tired to kick the trashcan.  Absurdly, before he even really catches himself doing it, he ends up wandering down to the mail room, starts absently sorting through the bin of packages and letters.  

He’d thought about heading to Chuck’s house and getting that whole awful conversation over with, but he really doesn’t feel up to having an all-out family confrontation by candlelight—he’s not one of the goddamn Brontë sisters or something.  He can let it go for a couple days. He can let it go forever, really, if he wants to, which is tempting.  And even dead-sober, tonight he doesn’t know how well he’d be able to drive—he can’t believe he even made it here, how did he make it here?—let alone leave his phone in Chuck’s mailbox, which Jimmy, being a total sucker, knows he’ll still do no matter how angry he is with his brother.

He’s on his third cup of coffee—out of some stupid sense of decorum he’s decided not to smoke in the building—when he hears some muffled movement outside.  He’s wearing a pair of women’s reading glasses he found in a desk drawer and looking over a letter from an incarcerated HHM client, holding it so close under the banker’s lamp that he’s half-expecting it to catch fire and trying to decipher who exactly its intended recipient is, and there’s this noise like a soft, measured scraping just outside the door.  Maybe it's the cleaning crew, though it’s a little after three-thirty in the morning and that level of dedication seems a little unlikely.  Jimmy figures it’s probably too late to turn the light off and hide, so after a moderately tense pause he shrugs and carries on reading.  

He finally comes to the conclusion that the letter is probably for Kim (it’s addressed to a woman and he supposes it’s complimentary, in a crass sort of way) when the door handle turns and Howard Hamlin is standing there with his perfect fucking Sassafras Glow hair, holding a coffee mug and wearing slippers and lounge pants, a matching button-up with “H.H.” monogrammed onto the breast pocket with what Jimmy suspects is hamlindigo blue-colored thread.  There’s a pen behind his ear and a file under his arm.  He looks studious, in an aging frat boy sort of way.

"Working late?” Jimmy posits casually, peering over the cherry-red and rhinestone-studded rim of his borrowed glasses like this is the most ordinary scenario in the world, delirium bubbling up like a horrible, unstoppable poison in his throat.  

“Jesus, Jimmy,” Howard says after a long pause and some protracted staring, but softly, like he’s not even angry or remotely surprised, “What are you doing here?”

“I live in a nail salon,” Jimmy replies, smiling wildly, taking off the glasses and polishing them carefully with his cheap tie, which if he’s being honest with himself (and he should be, no one else is) is probably just making the lenses dirtier.  “Sorry I called you a pig-fucker, Howard.”

And then suddenly, horrifically, he feels like he’s finally going to cry.  His eyes are prickling, his vision is glossing over like he’s looking at the room through frosted glass.  It’s not like Jimmy is anti-crying or anything, but he’s a total loser, this is still Howard Hamlin (who’s pretty much the antithesis of a loser, even in his stupid designer pajamas), and any emotional display coming from him will definitely seem like groveling or manipulation.

And Jimmy is done being felt sorry for, done feeling like everything he’s ever accomplished was gained through sympathy or as the spoils of some ridiculous con.  So he impatiently mashes his palm against his eyes and puts the glasses back on, tries not to look at Howard—who’s just _standing_ there—stares at the letter and moves his eyes back and forth like he’s intently reading.  

Howard fucking Hamlin.  

He doesn’t even get whether or not he’s an asshole now; there are too many complicating factors at play here, and Jimmy likes to keep up to date on who’s an asshole and who’s not.  The color patent is definitely bad.  The whole covering-for-Chuck thing was also pretty bad, but somewhat reasonable.  Jimmy’s not sure if Howard was trying to spare his feelings or avoiding escalating an already-problematic workplace situation, but he has to concede that either way, he’s hardly the antichrist.  Sure, Jimmy’s more or less wasted a decade of his life grasping for completely unattainable goals in a fucking desert wasteland, but now that’s seeming less and less like it’s All Howard’s Fault and more like he’s dead at the center of some spectacularly unfunny satire in which he’s given up being a con artist for the golden opportunity to play the dupe in someone else’s con.  He can’t even say that he’s a decent hustler anymore.  Evidently, he’s not even the best hustler in his immediate family.

“Jimmy,” Howard says again in that same soft, neutral tone you’d use with a pet or child, and Jimmy realizes that he must look at least half as off-kilter as he feels.  

He takes off the glasses again, closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and says defeatedly, “Christ, Howard, just let me sort the mail.”

“How did you get the suit right, anyways?” Howard replies evenly and with the faint hint of a smile. He doesn’t miss a beat when he changes the subject. He must be one hell of a lawyer.

“What?” Jimmy asks dumbly, and he’s startled by the voice that’s coming out of his mouth, which isn’t his normal voice at all, it’s all weird and constricted.

“That suit—my suit. That was really something, Jimmy.”  

He’s talking about the whole billboard debacle. Probably not his finest hour. 

“Oh, right, that. Yeah, but I had to photoshop the hair,” Jimmy says apologetically.  “I didn’t want it to be, you know… like that forever.”

And just like that he’s crying, and not gracefully, either.  It’s actual full-blown sobbing and it’s mortifying and he can’t make it stop. He covers his face with his forearm, he doesn’t want to be looked at, he wants to be suddenly, mercifully alone when he moves his arm away.  Alone or somewhere else, somewhere he’s never been where there’s nothing and no one around to remind him of his stupid, shitty life.  But instead, when he peers over his sleeve he sees Howard pulling a pocket square out of his goddamn pajama pocket, and it’s monogrammed too, and Jimmy starts to laugh a little mid-cry, because this is just too weird, which makes him cough.

Jimmy takes the scrap of fabric but he can’t make himself wipe his nose on Howard’s initials right now.  It would’ve been funny yesterday, but today everything’s all mixed up.  So he sniffles and wipes the tears on the sleeve of his jacket.

“This is nice,” he says, gesturing toward Howard with the handkerchief, which is totally made of silk, or at the very least extremely high thread count cotton.

“Jimmy… I’m sorry,” says Howard, and now he’s the one who’s looking away, which Jimmy doesn’t get at all.

“For what?” he asks incredulously, “I’m the one who acted like complete dick for years. _Years_.”

Howard doesn’t say anything, he just looks at Jimmy pointedly, and Jimmy understands—he’s sorry that Jimmy’s been spinning his wheels believing in a payoff that will cancel out all the bullshit, believing that you have to be miserable for a long time to ever be happy, he’s sorry that Jimmy moved cross-country to be a mail clerk.  He’s sorry that they could never talk with one another like normal people, that there was always this horrible thing in the way.  And Jimmy must have really lost his mind sometime today, because not only has he more or less accepted that this isn't Howard’s fault, but now he’s starting to suspect that maybe, just maybe, it’s not entirely his own fault, either.

“Do you really live in a nail salon?” Howard asks, breaking Jimmy out of his introspection and sitting his coffee cup down on the desk like he’s planning on sticking around a while.  His brows are knitted together, the textbook definition of concern.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, and he smiles resignedly when his voice cracks.  “It’s also my office.”

“Oh.  Fuck,” says Howard, wide-eyed, and Jimmy literally does a double-take because he’s never heard him swear in his life—and he should know, he’s been keeping track, since the straightlaced, prissy affect was one of a long list of things that fueled his hatred.  Howard, who called him “Charlie Hustle” and pretty much made him want to vomit 24/7.  Just like that Jimmy knows he’s about to do something potentially catastrophic, like DEFCON-1 catastrophic, and he doesn’t even care.  

“Come here,” he sighs, and Howard takes a carefully premeditated half-step forward, “here’s another reason why my brother thinks I’m scum. I bet you don’t know this one. It’s top-secret.”

Jimmy reaches for the knot on Howard’s pajama pants before he can let himself think about it too much—he can’t believe he’s doing this, he can’t believe he even _wants_ to do this, but he doesn’t quite feel like he’s living in his body right now and everything is the daft, misguided move of someone else, some desperate weirdo in a lucid dream, so fuck it.  Suddenly all he can think about is wiping Howard Hamlin’s come off his face with that ridiculous monogrammed pocket square.  God, he’s a _loser._

He shouldn’t be surprised when Howard backs away abruptly, knocks over his coffee cup, and after it spills Jimmy realizes with rising hysteria that it’s actually full of hot chocolate, tiny marshmallows and all.  The world is a terrible place and there’s no place in it for Jimmy McGill, almost-sex-offender, fuckup, and perennial black sheep.  And it’s not unfair, it’s completely fair, and Jimmy should’ve realized it sooner.  Natural selection has been trying to weed him out for a long time now.  Maybe some of his old liquor is still hidden in the mailroom—he’ll overturn the whole place once Howard finally decides to leave him the fuck alone.  He feels himself completely closing off—it's almost a physical feeling, like something in his brain is being covered up like old furniture.  

He’s torn between formulating a bitter, sneering response or feigning indifference.  Instead he starts to cry again.  At least this time it’s the noiseless, TV-movie variety of crying.  Small mercies.

Howard raises his hands, panicked, like he’s going to touch Jimmy but then decided that’d be the wrong move.  Jimmy is just another coral snake in the wasteland.

But obviously Howard can read minds, and if that’s part of being a real lawyer then Jimmy _really_ shouldn’t have bothered taking the bar, he doesn’t have the ESP for it.  “It’s not—Jimmy, no, it’s just—shouldn’t we go to dinner or something first?” Howard says, awkward and exasperated, resting the tips of his fingers to his forehead, and Jimmy stares at him like he’s just revealed himself to be harboring a hidden siamese twin under his pajamas.

“Dinner?” he finally says, uncomprehending.  But it’s turning into another one of those peculiar moments he’s come to expect from today where things start coming together and making sense, and all these revelations are getting a little exhausting but he’s sort of relieved to be getting them out of the way en masse.  Howard doesn’t mean no, he probably doesn’t even necessarily mean dinner (or at least Jimmy has to assume he doesn’t—come on, what decade does he think it is?) just some other, more convenient time when Jimmy isn’t crying in the mailroom or breaking and entering.

Man, this could piss Chuck off, assuming it turns into a thing.  Whatever.  

“Come on, Charlie Hustle,” Howard says decisively, his eyes bright with amusement at his totally creepy use of the stupid nickname, “why don’t we go get some breakfast?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading my weird story, guys!! I was going to title it "drafty cells and draftier castles," which is a line from a Sylvia Plath poem because I'm a total tool and think that's a cool thing to do, but I ended up using a line from Smoke on the Water since it plays at the end of the season and seemed apropos. What do you think? Anyways, thanks again, for real :)  
> -silver&exact


End file.
